Use MailTags and kiss your folders goodbye
David Emery provides a rave review 
of how Spotlight and MailTags, the prince of plugins, help him to be more productive at the office.
Everyone else in the office files their emails. Not David:
In a work environment I can just about understand the need for filing things in folders; but I think this behaviour stems from how older email programs worked. With Mail.app on Mac OS X 10.4 the search is brilliant…. Hence, whenever I want to find a specific email I just search for it; which takes about the same time I imagine opening a folder and scanning its contents for the correct email would take.
He gets extra search precision and power by using MailTags :
Using this plugin, I tag every email that comes in with a set of tags that will help when I come so search for something. So, for example, if I get an email about a Thom Yorke website, I’ll tag it with “Thom Yorke” and “XL” (the [recording] label). This also exposes another weakness with the traditional filing model – you can’t have something in two folders at once.
All this tagging, though, only helps to add some context to an email that might not happen to mention its topic – a notes panel would do the trick as well, if it was searchable.
Regular Hawk Wings readers will remember recent research on how hard it is for people to give up folders for their email.
Tags: email, folders, mail.app,apple mail, mailtags, plugins, Productivity, tagsRelated posts
August 15th, 2006 at 11:17 pm
I’m a big fan of MailTags, but I still find spotlight a bit buggy (it has failed to find some existing messages more than a few times). And it seems using IMAP makes everything a bit more fragile (Spotlight, MailTags).
My intermediate solution to this is to still file, but file a lot less. Most of the emails go into a big “Archive” folder, and of course, I have a “zero inbox”. Thanks to the Mail 2 kGTD plugin I’ve done away with action related folders (or rather, I’m almost there!), since every email can be linked in kGTD and filed away.
August 15th, 2006 at 11:29 pm
While I agree that foldering your mail to keep it ogranized is a leftover from before decent search capabilities, there is still a very good reason to keep your mail in folders - size.
I am not aware of a single mail application that handles having huge or even large inboxes and folders well. There are always people out there who will say they have XXXX messages and have never had a problem. However there are many if not more people who have had problems.
The simple fact of the matter is that no matter how quick and efficient the mail server and the mail client application are - it will always be faster to view 5 messages as opposed to 5000.
August 16th, 2006 at 2:01 am
Isn’t MailTags’ Notes field searchable right now, at v. 1.2.2? I just tested it, and it seems to work fine.
August 16th, 2006 at 2:04 am
I agree to Anthony. Using IMAP accounts with a lot of traffic is a bit messy, when you have about 1 to 1k Mails in your inbox and another XXk in another folders. It simply loads faster :)
August 16th, 2006 at 2:38 am
hey nate,
searching in the notes field works fine for me too.
August 16th, 2006 at 5:08 am
As a donator a look forward to 2.0 with amazing feelings :) This plugin is worth a lot more than 20 bucks for me!
August 16th, 2006 at 6:50 am
Nate and Denny - I meant that if it didn’t have a tags field, just a notes field would do instead - for example, if Mail.app 3.0 added a text field you could edit on each message, that would probably do (although not as smoothly as MailTags).
Anthony - I have about 8000 mails in my inbox at work, and 5500 ish at home, and I’ve never had a problem ;-) I do appreciate that on some people’s set ups, though, it can get a bit slow. Also, I’m not using IMAP, which I think would get pretty problematic with the everything-in-one-mailbox model - maybe folders for each month would work in that case.
I think it’s more about getting rid of the “must file; must have an empty inbox” mantra that a lot of people have, and moving to something easier, quicker and more flexible.
(Oh and by the way, it’s David Emery, not Emory.)
August 16th, 2006 at 9:03 am
@Nate — probably. I can’t remember 1.2.2 :(
August 16th, 2006 at 9:21 am
When I used Mulberry it handled my largest IMAP mailboxes relatively efficiently. IMAP or not, I agree that issues like performance and stability can become a factor in determining optimal mailbox sizes.
Plenty of people seem to be managing their monolithic Gmail mailboxes okay with only a combination of conversation threading, searching and simplistic labeling.
I like Gmail’s “folderless” storage but as a mail client it lacks capabilities still important to me for organizing messages. And I dislike filing messages in separate, (semi-)permanent mailboxes as a way to organize them with traditional mail clients.
I’d prefer a mail client where all my messages were easily accessible in a single iTunes-like library “Mail Archive” (regardless of how the backend storage were implemented for efficiency’s sake), with virtual mailboxes similar to iTunes playlists for collecting/organizing/viewing messages in various ways. It would be trivial to create those mailboxes from search results and add/delete messages to/from them automatically or manually. An “INBOX” would just be a virtual mailbox matching appropriate conditions. Deleting virtual mailboxes wouldn’t actually delete messages they contain unless explicitly requested. Sort of a fusion of Gmail and traditional clients, plus additional message attributes (e.g. tags) for more flexibility.
August 16th, 2006 at 9:46 am
I now have just the Archive folder for received email, and the Sent folder for sent email. I have a couple of temporary smart folders for use in GTD mode.
Yep, MailTags & Spotlight have managed to make that possible. Consequently I’ve saved a packet of time in deciding which folder to put a message in, putting it there, looking for it and so on.
I’ve not had a problem with Spotlight not finding messages, nor with ~3000 messages in my Archive folder.
I do have problems with MailTags not carrying tags forward into replies. It’s very unreliable (possibly due to user error) which means sent mail is searched via content rather than tags.
August 16th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
let’s not forget Google Mail has introduced tagging (aka labels) for quite some time now!
now does MailTags up the ante by providing a taxonomy browser of some type or even a tag cloud?
My list is admitted out of control and wish I could cluster certain tags due to higher-order contexts.
I am not a .Mac user - does meta-data such as tags get reflected in the remote interface? I’m a big stickler for web-interfaces and really excited about the new Leopard improvements coming down the pipe and really want to know how remote access to Mail, iCal, todos, notes is to pan out!
August 17th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Gmail labels are very basic, e.g. they can’t be nested or clouded. It’s an example of why I said earlier that Gmail lacks capabilities important to me for organizing messages. It has many concepts I like but the overall implementation still seems immature. Heck, Apple Mail is frustratingly close to being ideal for my relatively modest purposes if it would just grow up a bit.
August 17th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
ah - missed your gmail comment, sjk.
I agree with you entirely and been wanting to find folks who are willing to make a case to the gmail folks if they are not working on this already (I don’t have any inside info - only contacts).
Right now I have a what I’ll call at best, a “homeboy” version of GTD implemented in the gmail interface. It obviously lacks quite a bit (esp in the area of automation) but the components are clearly coming (ie. Google Calendar for a tickler, day-specific todos)
One the things that is missing most for me is a bonafide API - I want to be able to query and manage my metadata (ie. my contexts) with simple scripts or even a mashup.
It’s a pleasant surprise to see Apple Mail GTD implementations - I had dismissed it quite awhile ago and starting to miss my Netcentrics GTD Add-in which went out the door with my commitment to be with Google Mail over the past year!
ok - to set the record straight, I don’t intend to get onto Apple Mail til Leopard releases this Spring so it’s 6 more moths of fiddling with gmail with anyone who is interested too. Anyone playing with the developer preview of Apple Mail with the new todo service?
ps. pls excuse me if I am going off topic in a Apple Mail-centric blog. any suggestions on where to move this conversation is much appreciated - the GTD forum was a bit to generic last I checked - I tend to bond more with us Mac OS X folks :)